Author: Goulish, Matthew
Paperback/softback 72pp
h190mm x w120mm x s5mm
4 Colour Illustrations
ISBN13 9781915000002
978-1-915000-00-2
ISBN10 1915000009
The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: ‘Kingfisher’ by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption – an accidental sighting – with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another’s freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler’s Notch.
About the author: Matthew Goulish co-founded Every house has a door in 2008 with Lin Hixson. He is dramaturg, writer, and sometimes performer with the company. He was a founding member of Goat Island, the Chicago-based performance group that existed from 1987 to 2009. His books include 39 microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001), The Brightest Thing in the World – 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), Work from Memory: In Response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, co-authored with Dan Beachy-Quick (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Pitch and Revelation—Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, co-authored with Will Daddario (Punctum Books, 2022). His essays have appeared in Richard Rezac Address (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Propositions in the Making – Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the Writing Program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.